Posts Tagged ‘Tiger Woods’
Top 10 reputation crisis of 2010 – a recap!
Being Reputation Management Consultants, Reputation Management For.com, have come with our list of top 10 reputation crashes in the year that was! Being the festive season and all, we’re doing it as honors awarded to the great captains of Industries, firms, celebrities and brands that went through a reputation storm in 2010… Read the rest of this entry »
Mel Gibson reputation – Is the worst over?
As we mull over how Mel Gibson’s reputation, future plans and how even a comeback can materialize, he seems to have found some reprieve. Mel’s ex-wife has come out with a signed affidavit saying he was never abusive towards her or her children. This coming from a 28-year marriage does bring in some good tidings for the star.
However, there is still that question – “Will Mel Gibson go to jail?” to be dealt with and the legal teams are probably going to battle it out over extortion threats from Oksana Grigorieva and spousal abuse from Gibson being fought at length. From a celebrity crisis and damage control angle, Robyn Moore’s affidavit is like a God-sent for Gibson.
It’s almost certain that Hollywood will let things play out and wait for the outcome of the legal case for child custody. Whoopi Goldberg’s attempt at supporting her friend is frankly not enough, apart from the ‘racist’ tag Gibson also needs to fight his ‘misogynist’ and ‘abuser’ tag.
Like Tiger Woods who is now battling golfing trouble after his reputation debacle Mel Gibson will have to make a comeback that is so awe-inspiring that all’s forgiven in the name of art and cinema. Tiger Woods is well aware of this as well as he fumbles to get his groove back on the green.
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Tiger Woods Press conference & apology – Brand Tiger still deeply wounded!
Tiger Woods apology and press conference yesterday went off without a glitch except for a couple of nervous stops in the beginning. He tried to talk about everything a reporter would have wanted to question him. His mom was present and his wife’s family, he even thanked Accenture, and the golfing community for understanding the timing of his apology.
The read out speech asking for atonement, telling the Paparazzi to stay away from his family and saying he was sorry thrice was all very well.
In celebrity reputation management terms, Tiger did all that he needed to do, touching upon spirituality and Buddhism and his therapy and the millions of kids who idolized him – he said it all!
But I wasn’t moved, there were tears and he touched on all aspects, yet watching it one was left with questions of how it seemed only rehearsed.
- This is a man who was an expert in leading a double life and perpetuating a holier-than-thou persona off the golf course.
- The Tiger brand thrived on his presumed golden image – the star with no faults – a star like no other.
The extent of the damage on the Tiger Woods brand to me seemed more evident yesterday in the public apology. Again we are not talking about the golfer Tiger Woods but the brand which projected him as the ideal on and off the field.
Tiger is definitely not out of the woods yet, with his problems or image, the public still feel cheated and only time and a phenomenal comeback in the game can really solve this.
Conclusion: For now this ‘mea culpa’ can be only termed as the tiniest step in rebuilding his brand. The golfing circuits need the Tiger brand back and up; after all he is the one who brings in the crowds!
Google Query Suggestions – Google Suggests Scam
Recently we have been contacted by companies being hit hard by Google Query Suggestions. If you are not sure what these are, when you start typing words into Google, it will come back with suggestions as you type. See example below:
So sounds harmless enough? I am sure it was intended to be, if you check out Google’s Query Suggestion page
Why it’s helpful
- Rest your fingers.
Need to do a big search on a tiny keyboard? Suggestions come in real-time, so typing [ great w ] and clicking ‘great wall of china’ is faster and easier than typing it out. - Catch a mistake.
Did you mean: Melbourne Australia? Start searching for [ melborn ], say, and Google Suggest will offer more common spellings for what you might be trying to find. - Skip a page; save some time.
If Google detects that a specific site is relevant to the search you’re typing, we’ll provide a link straight to it, so you don’t have to wait for the search results page. If a link is to a site in our adversiter network, it’ll appear in a colored box labeled ‘Sponsored Link.’ - Repeat a favourite search.
If you’re signed in to your Google Account and have Web History enabled, we may show some suggestions based on searches you’ve done in the past. You can tell a suggestion is from your history if it has a Remove link next to it.
Splitting the atom, scientists at first looked at this as a way to generate power efficiently, of course it didn’t take long for some people to look at how they can use it for weapons of mass destruction. Guess what? Some people are now looking at query suggestions as a weapon of mass destruction to a company’s reputation.
So how can this very innocent feature that google introduced become a company killer? The search query is set off when when people start searching for specific keyword terms, so for example people searching for Olympics will start adding specific years. Google picks up on this and starts to offer it as suggestions.
If you have a large number of customers and some of them have had a bad experience, then they may start looking for a way to complain and start searching terms like “Your Company Name + Complaints”, enough people start doing it and it can soon become a Google suggested query. Even worse is someone could add a few negative comments about your company in a forum and before you know it not only is Google now making negative suggestions but also the negative forums are now showing up for your company name or brand quite often above your own site. Look what happened to Tiger Woods in a very short time.
So it won’t take long for unscrupulous competitors to catching on to this and start seeding such search quires. Once it takes hold it will be very difficult and costly to fix in both time and effort.
Another issues that can cause you problems is your business model, if you ask for money upfront people are incredibly suspicious. We have had several companies approach us about this exact problem, a potential customer will type search terms like “Company Name + Scam” or “Company Name + Hoax” again it does not take many of the same searches to trigger Google’s suggested query and now you have a massive online reputation problem. Follow this up with a few negative comments in a forum or a site like scam.com and it could cost you your business.
Make sure you are on top of you customer complaints procedure before issues get out of hand. If you product is not up to scratch don’t be surprised if it does not take long for Google to pick up on this. We have managed to help companies reputation online by introducing certain procedures to reduce and water down the impact once negative suggested queries started to effect their business.
Taking a proactive approach will help defend your company name, brands and reputation online, make sure you listen to customers and remember to show that you have. A journalist cannot follow a story if you have shown you heard the problems and are addressing them. If you bury your head in the sand then it will be a very costly exercise.

